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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29988822">As Thick as Blood</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reavv/pseuds/Reavv'>Reavv</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Batman - All Media Types, Dead by Daylight (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>(in a very circuitous way), Action/Adventure, Altered Mental States, But also, Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Horror, Morally Ambiguous Character, bad things happen to characters who are so used to it they dont consider it bad anymore, breaking canon with a crowbar</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 09:55:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,160</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29988822</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reavv/pseuds/Reavv</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jason Todd is having a really strange day.</p><p>It had started normal enough, for a given value of normal when you’re a League of Shadows-trained ex-vigilante in pursuit of personal vengeance against the fucking family that replaced you, and the clown that killed you. </p><p>And then it gets weird. </p><p>—</p><p>In which the Entity doesn't do its research on the next Killer it kidnaps, and a character used to the superhero genre has to contend with survival horror—at first. Nothing keeps the Red Hood down for very long, not death, not abandonment, and not eldritch beings feeding off fear and anger.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>14</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>98</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>As Thick as Blood</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Oh boy</p><p>Ok, so: first of all, I'm using a blended canon of Batman because there are so many iterations and universes that it's almost impossible to keep track. The main thing you need to know (if you've never read/watched/played) any Batman media is that Jason Todd was the second Robin, who died after a bit of a falling out with Batman at the hands of the Joker (and through the facilitation of his birth mother Sheila), somehow was ressurected and crawled out of his grave catatonic, and then got kidnapped by the League of Shadows. Talia al Ghul is one of Bruce's (Batman's) exes, and for some reason she takes care of Jason while teaching him how to be an assassin, until eventually she throws him into the Tartarus Pit to fix his catatonia (with the fun side effect of mental instability and anger), and then manipulates things so that develops a grudge against Batman and the new Robin, and sets him loose, where he proceeds to concoct a plan to kill both, along with the Joker. </p><p>Or something. </p><p>This continuum starts before the Red Hood gets revealed to be Jason Todd, and before he can finish his finale confrontation with Batman.  </p><p>Dead By Daylight side of things: the game mostly has lore in small journal logs or character snippets, and so I am taking full liberty to go ham wild with characterisation and plot. Yes, some of the characters have lore outside the game because they're franchise characters (pyramid head, ghost face, etc) but I'm mostly using what the game gives me as a base and otherwise ignoring a lot of the outside canon. This is for a few reasons: one) their experiences are wildly different to how they are in the outside canon, considering being stuck in the fog for how ever many years and cut off from what created them in the first place, and two) Im lazy and dont want to have to look up that many wikis</p><p>If you haven't played the game, the basics are: The Entity is a demon of some kind that feeds off of negative emotions, and in order to feed, has gone around into different worlds and kidnapped both killers and victims to play a never ending game. Stuck in the Entity's domain (the fog), the survivors die over and over, until eventually their emotions go numb and the Entity disposes of them. There is no escape. </p><p>Hopefully that covers everything? </p><p>This is my weirdest crossover, so I hope you stick with it even if it's kinda a wild ride. </p><p>As always, join the <a href="https://discord.gg/cun3KPZ"> Discord </a> to catch sneak peeks, and chat fanfic and other fandom things.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>There’s only so long you can stay caught in a web before you stop struggling. The fog is familiar in form but not content, seperate from all the nooks and crannies of perversion you are used to. It is sterile, even as it echoes familiar places full of rot and bile.</p><p>Fake. A facade. All the more obvious when the meat comes through, erratic heartbeats scurrying like mice, running, hiding, familiar in form if not content.</p><p>But they come back. Death is not an escape here. Escape is not an escape. You could butcher every last one of them but it would not matter.</p><p>You start to recognise some. An older man with a wheezing breath, sturdy despite all that, a stalwart wall in place of others. A nervous man with lackluster skills on his own, and prodigious skills at motivating the others. A woman, stealthy, silent, moving through and over obstacles faster than a rat. Another, hands calm even when covered in blood, staunching injury and hurt.</p><p>Others. The saboteur. The gambler. The half-dead. More.</p><p>And the familiar, too. The woman from the past, from the other fog.</p><p>You kill them with blade, with hook. You sacrifice them to this new fog, its spider web just as much of a hook into your own skin, crawling, itching, demanding things of you. It is angry at you when you kill them one way and not another, rewards you with trinkets and the illusion of choice when you succeed. It—</p><p>“Oi, pumpkin head,” a voice snaps. “You want to learn how to break pallets properly or what?”</p><p>The trapper is disagreeable. You nod anyways.</p><p>Suspicious eyes stare at you through a cracked mask. The trapper shifts his feet, head almost in line with yours, before turning back to the square of wood and metal in front of the both of you.</p><p>In the shadows of the room one of the children snorts, passing cigarettes between them, their own masks tilted up to expose chapped lips.</p><p>The children hate being called children, you vaguely remember. You continue to do so. They are like starving pups shivering in cold and illness, not mutated but on the cusp, hands clenched around knives because their claws have not grown in.</p><p>“—you’re big enough it shouldn’t be a problem, unlike the pipsqueaks over there,” the trapper continues, ignoring or else oblivious to your thoughts. “But even they can’t fuck this up in a chase if they do it right.”</p><p>“Oh fuck off,” one of the children mutter. But quietly. They are brash, but aware of the difference between them and the others. No mutation, no magic, no ghosts. Just meat killing meat.</p><p>You listen to the trapper speak of wood and splinters and how to hit so it will hurt, and nod when needed, and you do not raise your cleaver to cut the meat even though the urge rises. The meat never is cut properly, anyways. The fog doesn’t let rot set in before it rises again, angry. You have fought the other hunters for years, at this point.</p><p>There is no point. The only point is the fog and the spider under your feet, spinning its web. Familiar in form if not content. Cut the trapper and you will find metal teeth littering the ground where you walk, eager to snatch you up. Cut one of the children and you will find a knife in your back from another of them. Cut the—</p><p>Sparks fly as your cleaver meets another, smaller one, this one cobbled together out of broken things. The trapper looks at you over his raised weapon, irritation, anger, the same blood hot itch of the spider under your feet.</p><p>Somewhere nearby a laugh like a hyena, the perked interest of all hunters zeroing on the echo of blood.</p><p>You lower your cleaver.</p><p>“ ‘es worse than the demogorgon,” one of the children mutters.</p><p>There’s a tremble of the ground beneath your feet, and silence falls. A trial ended, a new one to start, a chance to make bleed the scurrying rats—</p><p>The ground cracks and swallows one of the children whole.</p><p>“Jesus fuck,” one of the others snap, scrambling away from the maw in instinct.</p><p>You do not feel disappointment. What use is that when you know your time will come.</p><p>“Tch. At least it’s not another newcomer,” the trapper mutters.</p><p>“The last one was cool, though,” one of the children replies quietly. They are fans of more than death, you muse. The singer is of little interest to you, but you are not surprised the children find him otherwise.</p><p>You turn to leave. You have learnt what you came to learn, and you have no desire to get involved in a squabble between the others. Perhaps in the beginning you would have, but now—</p><p>The ground trembles again. You pause. The children pause. The trapper pauses. The ground continues to quake like a stuttering heart. It is too soon for the previous trial to end, and although it’s possible a new one would have started—</p><p>The ground splits like a rotten wound, spilling bile and blood, washing the room with a sickly light, as something crawls its way out of the ground like a corpse out of a grave.</p><p>“—I’m going to make you eat your own entrails with a spoon—“ the corpse spits, hacks, scrambles to its feet, helmeted head swinging wildly as hands move to grab the guns at its hips.</p><p>You raise your cleaver. You know what to do with guns and bullets and men stinking of fear.</p><p>The children scatter, even as one hoots with exhilaration. The trapper swings his broken cleaver, eyes flashing with bloodlust through his broken mask.</p><p>The spiderweb of fog keeping them caught is familiar in form if not content, a slog of memories turned cage, wearing down even the core of hunger that birthed you.</p><p>But new meat is new meat.</p><p>—</p><p>Jason Todd is having a really strange day.</p><p>It had started normal enough, for a given value of normal when you’re a League of Shadows-trained ex-vigilante in pursuit of personal vengeance against the fucking family that replaced you, and the clown that killed you. Which for Jason had meant a nightmare-filled night drawn into a nightmare-filled morning, sweat-covered sheats reminiscent of a childhood in the presence of addicts, heart beating loud in the quiet of the safehouse, eyes flickering with animal fear at the corners of the room.</p><p>The pit makes you angry. The kind of anger that’s bone deep, a fucking bullet to the head of emotion. But Jason’s anger has always been rooted in paranoia and anxiety—that he won’t be enough, that he’ll wake up to his mother’s corpse, that one of the gangs will get a hold of him, and later, when some of those were true, that he’d fail hard enough to lose even the escape of being Robin.</p><p>Well those have all been realised, and only the anger remains. Even if the anger sometimes tastes like something closer to fear.</p><p>When he had stopped shivering, mind pulled out of the echoing laughter of his dreams, when his thoughts eventually turned back to his plans and schemes, he shoved all memories of those fears down under the cresting wave of the pit. He gathered his gear, his guns and his knives and his bloody knuckles, and started a prowling jaunt around his territory.</p><p><em>His</em> territory. These streets belong to him in a way Gotham will never fucking belong to Batman. He knows them, lives them, was born out of the refuge and bloodsoaked stones of its buildings. Batman, in his tower of martyrdom above it all, knows nothing of the Red Hood’s world down here in Crime Alley. His death would never change that.</p><p>A dozen or so drug dealers and mob thugs later, and he’d been nursing both his wounds and his anger in an alley filled with weeks old garbage. He has a week left, by his calculations, before he’s ready for the big finale. Talia thinks his plan won’t work, he can tell, but fuck her. As if she knows Bruce better than he does—as if she understands the anger simmering under the Red Hood’s mask.</p><p>Talia doesn’t do emotions. Not even anger.</p><p>So he’s pretty fucking tired, having cleaned the streets of some handful of scum, blood covering more than just his hands, drying slowly against the red of his mask. And he’s pretty fucking angry, but that’s his normal, these days.</p><p>He’s just about debating heading back to his safehouse, or doing some recon on the bat and his replacement bird, when a noise from deeper in the alley has him snapping his head around, gun already raised.</p><p>Nothing. Just shadows and trash. But that means nothing in Gotham, where shadows and trash could be the new Rogue of the week.</p><p>He thumbs the safety off and moves forward, quietly.</p><p>Turns out, despite everything, he hasn’t changed much from that dumb sixteen-year-old rushing into a ticking time bomb of a building on a stranger’s say-so.</p><p>—</p><p>The shadows swallow him whole.</p><p>He doesn’t remember much about being six fucking feet under, but this is a bit too close for comfort.</p><p>—</p><p>He comes up swinging. Of course he does—Talia would put him back in his grave if a little shadow kidnapping could knock him off his stride. He doesn’t understand what happened, but he doesn’t <em>need</em> to.</p><p>He shoots the first body he sees, not really registering how fucking weird it is as he does. After Killer Croc, a seven foot tall man with a metal triangle for a head is nothing.</p><p>There’s other bodies around, too, that he tracks even as he lets himself fall on the defensive, trying to find an exit or door. Flashes of impressions, hoodies and jeans similar to any street kid in the Alley, masks, but not of any Rogue he recognises. Another tall figure, this one with spikes of some sort piercing one side, a broken mask, a knife made of scrap.</p><p>He doesn’t recognise them, which is more worrisome than his kidnapping. He knows all the players in Gotham, both the big names, and those that even Batman doesn’t know about. He’s had to, for his plan to work.</p><p>The triangle head isn’t the fastest Rogue he’s fought, but they’re in cramped quarters and he’s got a knife bigger than Red Hood is tall.</p><p>“You compensating for something there, big guy?” he spits, dodging back from a swing only to have to roll under one from the spiked figure. From the corner of the room one of the smaller figures cackles.</p><p>He drops one of his handguns instead of reloading—he doesn’t have time, and he’s running low on ammo for it anyways—and swings the semi-auto he confiscated from some drug dealers earlier in the night to try and take back some space.</p><p>“Stay still, motherfucker,” he snaps, even as he distantly registers that the bullets seem to be doing shit all. “Fucking metas.”</p><p>“Watch your step,” a voice calls out, giddily, and he curses again as he just misses losing a leg to a fucking bear trap.</p><p>“Watch your mouth, before I shut it for you,” someone responds, and the Red Hood spins just to catch a knife on the barrel of his gun. The spiked figure bears down on him, biceps the size of Jason’s head, and he curses again.</p><p>The Red Hood isn’t a small man. He’s bulked up after the pit, unrecognisable from the lanky kid he used to be. He’s still not going to be winning any games of strength against these two.</p><p>The kids, maybe. They look scrawny enough as long as they don’t have any meta powers.</p><p>He kicks out, aiming the reinforced heel of his boots towards the man’s kneecaps, and lets the blade glance off his gun with a screech of metal shavings, ducking under his reach. The triangle head swings again, not seeming worried about hitting his—ally?—forcing the Red Hood to jump over the swing.</p><p>There’s not a lot in the room. A wooden pallet, between two counters, a window that looks boarded shut, and a door that seems to open into nothingness. Jason can’t tell if it’s meant to be a trap or an illusion of some kind, but he moves towards it anyways.</p><p>A doorway is better than getting stuck between two metas with oversized-knives.</p><p>He brings his semi-auto up again, hoping that even if the damage is too much, it might serve as a decent shield. His luck holds, and he’s able to spray another round into the medley behind him. He takes the space granted from the hail of bullets to run.</p><p>There’s a screech of metal and wood and something other, and pain blossoms across his back. Even with the reach of the triangle head’s giant fucking cleaver, that doesn’t make sense.</p><p>“Jesus fucking christ,” he grunts, staggering a step forward before the rage sweeps over. Of fucking course the meta has some sort of range attack. Of fucking course. Because when has things ever gone right?</p><p>Jason is going to butcher the fuckers, and then steal whatever the fuck let them kidnap one of the most dangerous men on the streets and use it to drop Bruce from the top of the penis metaphor that is the Wayne Enterprise’s office building.</p><p>—</p><p>Susie is having a good time, for once. Sure, Frank is gone, leaving them stuck in one of the waystations with mister trap happy and cone head, but that still means there's more of the Legion than the other killers currently on ‘downtime’. They’re faster than both of them too, and cone head doesn’t have a great ability to differentiate between the four of them in the first place.</p><p>And then the newcomer shows up.</p><p>It’s a surprise, for sure, since they just recently got a newcomer. Usually the Entity only brings in new meat once and a while, and she doesn’t think she’s lost her sense of time enough to have missed months passing. Either the Entity is growing stronger, or—</p><p>She ducks out of the way of a spray of bullets and muffles a squeak.</p><p>A gun! The only other hunter with a gun is the Deathslinger, and his is more of a harpoon than a hunting rifle. She doesn’t recognise the ones the newcomer is using—Frank might—but despite the fact that they can’t really hurt each other permanently in the fog, it seems to be effective enough at making the trapper bleed.</p><p>“What the fuck,” Joey mutters, sliding over the pallet to take cover with her. “Wanna take a stab at him?”</p><p>Susie peeks over the top of the counter and hums.</p><p>If Frank were here all three of them would probably be in the fray, but without him—</p><p>“Not yet.”</p><p>He’s fast, and seems to have some moves. There’s not a lot of hunters who fight like he seems to—most of them prefer stealth, or bladed weapons, or traps. One or two-hit kills. The gunner is aiming for killshots too, but when that’s not working, he’s fighting like Frank might in a bar fight, except—smoother, she guesses. She doesn’t know how to explain it.</p><p>“Psst,” Julie whispers, on the other side of the counter. There’s a thump and then something goes sliding across the floor.</p><p>Susie reaches out and feels something hit her palm.</p><p>One of the gunner’s guns.</p><p>“Oh shit,” Joey whispers, excitement edging into his voice. “Does it work?”</p><p>She aims and presses the trigger like in the movies. There’s a quiet click, but no bullet.</p><p>“Damn, out of ammo.” Joey practically deflates. She vaguely remembers that Joey’s cousin ran a gun range, that Joey had always talked about wanting to go to. The memory is muted, hazy.</p><p>She doesn’t know how long they’ve been here, stuck, but it’s been—a while.</p><p>“New guy’s holding his own,” Julie says, vaulting over to join them. “But I wouldn’t put money on him.”</p><p>“Maybe against the trapper,” Joey replies, whooping when someone gets a hit in. Susie doesn’t try to keep track of the fight; when her adrenaline is pumping and the voice of the Entity is pressing down on her in the trials, she’s just as bloodthirsty as the rest of them, but without either of those she doesn’t much have of a desire to see the outcome.</p><p>“Imagine if the Oni was here, or the Nurse” she says instead. “Newcomer’s lucky most everyone is in a trial.”</p><p>There’s a sickening sound of bones cracking and Susie shudders.</p><p>“Cig?” Julie asks Joey, passing one over. No food, no drink, but the cigarettes in Frank’s pockets never run out. Like they’re stuck in time.</p><p>“Should probably stop. Last trial one of the survivors found me out from the smell,” Joey replies, even as he takes it from her. They light it with the end of Julie’s already-lit one, and the brief flare of light seems to catch the gunner’s attention for a second, before the trapper roars and tries to charge him.</p><p>“Sure it was the cigs?” Julie asks, looking curious. It does seem a little odd from a survivor to smell anything over the stench of rot most of the trials have.</p><p>“He was begging for a puff as I was stabbing him, so probably,” Joey replies.</p><p>There’s the familiar sound of cone head tearing up the ground—the Legion have never come to consensus on what to call it, and it’s not like the creature can tell them—and Susie looks up to see the newcomer get hit in the back.</p><p>“Oh I think that made him angry,” Julie says, hesitantly.</p><p>Susie blinks, watching as the newcomer moves from the defensive to the offensive, a curdling scream of rage echoing through the cabin. A berserker, then? Like the Oni?</p><p>She has a hard time keeping track of the fight from there. At some point he takes out a knife, which stirs some bit of interest in her, but he’s hard to follow. He’s almost acrobatic, in a way, twisting and jumping out of the way of attacks, vaulting and sliding to hit weak points.</p><p>Behind the trapper’s knees, under the cone head’s—cone head, whatever the fuck it is—the trapper’s wrist, the cone head’s armpit…</p><p>He gets a gash across his shoulder for his trouble, and another down one thigh. At one point he just dodges decapitation by sliding over the pallet—something only the Legion really does, of the hunters, weirdly—almost crashing into Julie as he does.</p><p>Susie and Julie scatter, neither interested in being stuck in cone head’s torment power, or having to pry off a bear trap again, but Joey seems to take that as a sign to join in. He’s always been a bit more hot-headed—reckless, eager to show off.</p><p>Once upon a time, if one of them got in a fight, they would all be there to take part. To defend each other, to help, to experience the thrill as the Legion, not as plain old Susie and Julie and Joey and Frank.</p><p>But the trials are always separate. They’ve had to learn to fight alone. Even Susie.</p><p>“Kick his ass!” Julie cries with a whoop, startling Susie and causing the newcomer to twitch, a momentary distraction that Joey takes full advantage of to stab upwards, between what Susie is starting to think is less ‘motorcycle leathers’ and more ‘body armour’.</p><p>The fight has turned into a full on brawl at this point. No one is being careful about their attacks, the trapper taking a hit from cone head’s cleaver and staggering backwards, only to swing blindly and cut into Joey’s back. The newcomer gets another lucky hit into the meat of cone head’s shoulder, but has to dodge someone’s blade and rolls right into a bear trap. It’s a circus—all that’s missing is the clown.</p><p>And then the ground trembles again.</p><p>The fight takes a moment to slow, but then there’s a hissing sound of a portal opening, and the newcomer leaps back out of the crowd just in time for a familiar body to drag itself out of the fog.</p><p>There’s a moment when the cabin stares at the just-arrived clown—come back from a trial, presumably—and the clown stares at the newcomer. And then the newcomer freaks out. Even more than he had earlier.</p><p>“—<em>motherfucking Joker goons</em>—”</p><p>“I’m guessing someone isn’t a fan of clowns,” Julie snorts.</p><p>“Guess not,” Susie replies, faint, as the Clown goes down hard under a flurry of blows. The newcomer is using his rifle like a baseball bat.</p><p>There’s a moment's pause where Susie imagines the others are appreciating the carnage being wrought, before the three others move back into the fray.</p><p>“Ah fuck this,” she hears Julie mutter, before the heat of her body disappears and she watches her join in.</p><p>Susie palms her knife and licks the back of her teeth. There’s a pumping excitement in her stomach. A mix of oily dread and baited breath. She feels her fingers twitch, the phantom feeling of blood under her hands.</p><p>She’s always the last one. It was like this with the first kill too.</p><p>She’s always the last one. But she’s also the one that makes the deepest cut.</p><p>—</p><p>By the time Jason becomes aware of himself again, the room is covered in more blood than makes sense for the amount of people he’d counted. It takes a moment before he realises why.</p><p>“First time?” a voice rasps, and he blinks out of his daze to a face in one of those cheap scream masks from the halloween store. Except this one isn’t so cheap.</p><p>“Who the fuck—” Jason stumbles. His head is killing him, a pounding almost as painful as getting his skull smashed in by the Joker.</p><p>“You did poor Jeffrey in good,” the voice continues, idly. “Good technique.”</p><p>“Sloppy,” another voice snorts, this one not even trying to pretend to be human. Jason can’t tell if the pig head is a mask of some kind, or something more unnatural.</p><p>“Don’t you go judging people on their neatness,” the scream mask replies. “Aren’t you the one always comparing killing to butchering?”</p><p>The Red Hood swings around. He’s surrounded, masked and grotesque figures watching him curiously. He counts them quickly—at least twelve that he can see. There might be more past the darkened doorway, but it’s impossible to tell.</p><p>At least twelve new villains in Gotham that he’s never seen before. If he’s even still in Gotham. He’s starting to doubt that.</p><p>“Whatever the fuck you want from me I guarantee you’re going to be disappointed,” he snaps, hand going for his remaining handgun.</p><p>“Want? There’s nothing any of us want from <em>you</em>,” the scream mask replies, head tilting. “You’re our new coworker, after all.”</p><p>Jason grits his teeth.</p><p>His whole body aches, wounds he doesn’t remember getting making themselves known. He feels like he’s one breath away from passing out, and yet—not. He’s in pain, yes, but it’s more like the memory of pain. It doesn’t line up exactly with what he feels like he should be feeling.</p><p>“Start making some fucking sense or I’m going to blow your motherfucking brains out,” he grunts, thumbing the safety off.</p><p>Someone cackles behind him, another raises what looks like a harpoon gun up at him. He’s pretty sure one of them is literally floating.</p><p>“You’ve already tried,” the scream mask says. “It’s not permanent here. Or do you not remember getting disemboweled?”</p><p>Jason pauses. Steadies his arm.</p><p>“...why bother,” pig mask mutters. “Either he learns or he gets eaten.”</p><p>“Oi, hurry it up,” a new voice says—one of the masked kids from before, although this one looks slightly different from his memories. “Give the newbie the rundown before one of the freaks snaps again.”</p><p>“I’m flattered, Frank,” the scream mask says, turning slowly. “Do you not consider me a freak?”</p><p>“Oh go suck yourself off, you sanctimonious prick,” the so-called Frank says. “Here’s the basics; congrats, you’ve just gotten kidnapped by a formless entity of evil. You’re now doomed to spend the rest of existence chasing a bunch of assholes around and sacrificing them in its name. On the bright side, as much killing as your heart could desire.”</p><p>“The Entity should be speaking to you already,” the scream mask says, ignoring Frank. “Usually there’s not so many of us here. You’re lucky—a lot of the hunters don’t tend to be very chatty. Some don’t enter the waystations at all, content to wander the fog endlessly. Serial killers; antisocial folk.”</p><p>The Red Hood shakes his head, gun almost slipping from nerveless fingers.</p><p>“You chose the wrong person to fuck around with,” he grits out, shuffling slowly to the side, keeping the scream mask in front of him as he rotates closer to the door. “Don’t you know who runs Crime Alley?”</p><p>“No, and neither will most of anyone here—but even if we did, what does it matter, in the fog?”</p><p>Jason hisses a breath between his clenched teeth, and imagines, for a moment, punching whoever is under the scream mask’s teeth in. He doesn’t have time to, or at least doesn't want to risk it while injured and surrounded. He’s used to bad odds in a fight, but he’s starting to lose feeling in his fingers.</p><p>He edges closer to the door. No one stops him. In the corner one of the less human-looking figures wheezes loudly, what passes for a head tracking him with animal precision despite clouded eyes.</p><p>The door is feeling like more and more of a trap the less it looks like anyone is going to stop him leaving. He ducks through it anyways.</p><p>The dark fog that covers everything stretching past the doorway doesn’t lighten any when he pushes through, thick and choking, making anything more than a foot or so in front of him completely obscured. It’s eerily quiet, too. Just the sound of his own breathing—and a groaning crack of wood behind him.</p><p>He whirls around.</p><p>The cabin is gone.</p><p>—</p><p>Jason walks for miles, feet never quite transitioning from sore to aching. His wounds seem to flow from one state to another—open, then closed, healing, then fresh again. He is starting to think he’s hallucinating hardcore, or else stuck in some sort of mental meta attack.</p><p>He sees no one as he walks.</p><p>Eventually, he realises he’s lost track of time. Fishing out one of his burner phones doesn’t help—it just gives him an error message and a no signal sign. It doesn’t seem to be losing battery, either.</p><p>At some point he realises he has both handguns, despite knowing that he’d lost one of them in the fight. His ammo is back, too. Unless his kidnappers are fucking with his head by restocking him, thats one sign that he’s likely hallucinating.</p><p>And then the ground shakes again. And suddenly he’s walking out of the fog into a clearing, a lit campfire in the distance and four figures sitting around it.</p><p>He knows, somehow, that they won’t see him, even as he gets closer. He takes that opportunity to examine them, cataloguing the lack of weapons and masks, fully human on the surface. Their clothes are dirty, covered in blood and dirt, and there’s a tired countenance that looks like it is trying to gather up enough energy to be paranoia.</p><p>His brain is telling him that they’re different from the others in the cabin. His training under Talia lets him recognise all the ways they’re weak, in comparison. His training under Bruce shows him how that’s been taken advantage of before.</p><p>Victims of whatever gang or villain group has kidnapped him, he thinks fuzzily. Or another trap—like Sheila. Yes, that makes more sense, a voice whispers, quiet enough it might as well be his own. The four are <em>too</em> obvious as victims. They’ve got to be bait, to be faking. Just waiting to hand him over to the Joker, or the Bat. Sheila looked just the same, the whisper continues.</p><p>Something about that rings a distant warning bell in his mind. A part of him is struggling to remember something.</p><p>It’s probably nothing—if it was important he’d know it already.</p><p>There’s a distance screech of wind, and the four startle, twitching to their feet. Anticipation builds sickly in the Red Hood’s mind. He can hear blood roaring in his ears.</p><p>The fog rolls in.</p><p>And then out.</p><p>—</p><p>“Shit, this is a new one,” Meg whispers, ducking behind a grimy garbage bin. “I hate learning new zones.”</p><p>The dark alley flickers with a broken light, and further out, she can make out a full moon broken up by some vague mark of a bat. Everything feels weirdly too big, or too small.</p><p>“Think it will be the new killer’s?” Dwight asks, just as quietly.</p><p>Meg inches past the dumpster and drops down next to him at the generator.</p><p>“Doesn’t look like Korea to me. Gives me more a Manhattan slum vibe,” she replies, before shutting up and working. Talking is dangerous in the trials—any noise is, but sometimes it feels like the Entity takes extra offence to speaking.</p><p>They work on the generator as quickly as they can, keeping an eye on the exits of the alley. They haven’t heard the killer’s terror radius yet, but that means little; some of the killers have abilities that reduce or stop the radius completely. From far off there’s a muffled explosion, Claudette or Bill having fucked up a gen.</p><p>She grits her teeth and pushes down any worrying. Hopefully that will distract the killer from their work here.</p><p>They’re almost done, just one cylinder left to start, when there’s a whisper of unease at the back of her neck. A chill goes down her spine and she shuffles away from the generator almost without conscious thought. Dwight glances at her in confused fear, and she shakes her head, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of the danger.</p><p>She sees nothing coming from either exit, not even a far off moving body. There’s nothing to her right or left, and there’s thick brick walls at her back and front.</p><p>That just leaves—</p><p>She slowly looks up.</p><p>Hallowed by the strange moon, perched on the edge of the roof of the building, a figure crouches. A red motorcycle helmet splattered with blood stares at her, glinting menacingly in the moonlight, washing out the rest of its leather-covered body.</p><p>Meg catches a scream before it can escape her lips and leaves Dwight to his fate—hopefully either she can draw attention away from him so he can finish the gen, or she can swing back around to finish it herself once the killer is distracted by him.</p><p>Either way, she runs.</p>
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